In an alarming development, Paul Bremer has managed to
strongarm the US-appointed Governing Council into supporting their complex, undemocratic, and even unrepresentative plan for a transfer of power.
This contradicts Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's demand for national democratic elections. I imagine Sistani read up on Bush v. Gore, saw the danger in a hand-selected government, and decided his country deserved better. To no avail, apparently.
"We are facing a very tense situation, perhaps the most tense since the end of the war," one of the council's Shiite members said. "None of us want a confrontation, but we have to realize we are traveling down a road that could lead to a very big confrontation."
The Bremer / Bush plan would "
select a new national assembly, which in turn would
pick a prime minister and cabinet," as the
Washington Post described it two days ago. Emphasis within the quote is mine, but here's an emphasis by someone else: "A former U.S. adviser to Bremer described the plan as 'an insane selection system of caucuses, like the Iowa caucus selecting those who will vote in New Hampshire.' "
It's weird to agree with the AEI, but even they condemn Bush's plan as the sabotage of democracy.
So we're back to the old pattern: Assess a situation, see that it requires careful diplomacy, then try to bulldoze the opposition no matter the cost. It's part and parcel of Bush's narcisistic worldview, as Fareed Zakaria notes:
How does the chief representative of the world's oldest constitutional democracy lose a popularity contest to the leader of a Leninist party?... Karim Raslan, a Malaysian writer, explained the local reaction: "Bush came to an economic group [APEC] and talked obsessively about terror. He sees all of us through that one prism. Yes, we worry about terror, but frankly that's not the sum of our lives. We have many other problems. We're retooling our economies, we're wondering how to deal with the rise of China, we're trying to address health, social and environmental problems. Hu talked about all this; he talked about our agenda, not just his agenda."
Our president is not just an embarrassment, he's a danger to worldwide stability. Sistani issued his fatwa calling for democratic elections in June; he continues to be ignored. And so, as the WaPo says,
If the council persists in supporting the American plan, many in Iraq's Shiite majority, who regard the grand ayatollah as their supreme spiritual authority, may reject the provisional government as illegitimate.
Bush may find in the end that Iraqis are not as compliant as the Congress he so resolutely steamrolls. The chaos now in Iraq could look like peanuts come spring. Can anything be done to save the situation?